Andrés Felipe Rivas Bolívar

Awarded in the inaugural Student Pitch Competition for autonomous wildfire ember (firebrand) detection, 3D tracking, and mitigation research. Co-developed with Adetola Ololade Nicole Koiki, supervised by Dr. Fernando Raffan-Montoya (Assistant Professor & Co-Director, FireTEC, UMD).

• Conduct research on UAV autonomy and aerial sensing for wildfire monitoring and suppression under Dr. Fernando Raffan-Montoya and Dr. Lina Maria Castano.
• Develop and integrate autonomy workflows using PX4 + ROS 2 for offboard mission orchestration, perception, and vehicle state estimation.
• Build field-to-simulation digital twins in Gazebo Harmonic and NVIDIA Isaac Sim 6.0 to evaluate coverage, planning, and perception algorithms.
• Apply machine learning and local Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to improve perception under degraded visual environments (smoke, thermal glare, variable terrain).
• Design flight experiments, collect field telemetry, and maintain reproducible software tooling for dataset curation and evaluation.

• Lead autonomy technical workflows for competition missions, coordinating integration across sensing, companion computing, and PX4 flight control.
• Featured in IEEE Spectrum chronicling field flight testing and autonomous water/suppression drops for rapid wildfire mitigation.
• Prototype real-time perception and mapping pipelines for wildfire monitoring utilizing radiometric thermal and RGB sensors with geospatial GIS tools.
• Ensure flight readiness: mission planning, pre-flight checklists, hardware-in-the-loop (HITL) testing, on-site troubleshooting, and post-flight telemetry debriefs.

• Supported an open-hardware microgrid modeling, monitoring, and proof-of-concept instrumentation project.
• Developed data processing, filtering, and telemetry monitoring scripts in Python and assisted with experimental setup and sensor calibration.

• Planned and supervised laboratory coursework; guided undergraduate students through practical mechanical design concepts, hands-on experiments, and graded engineering reports.

• Designed, prototyped, and assembled unmanned aircraft airframes and custom sensor mounts.
• Supported CAD workflows in SolidWorks, Fusion 360, and Autodesk Inventor; fabricated parts via 3D printing and composite laminates.

• Selected Coursework: ENAE788V Motion Planning for Autonomous Systems (Dr. Michael Otte); ENAE788M Hands-on Autonomous Aerial Robotics (Dr. Joseph Conroy).

• Thesis: Clasificación del estado de módulos fotovoltaicos a partir de datos sintéticos mediante modelado y algoritmos computacionales.
• Relevant Coursework: Machine Learning; Mechanical Design and Innovation; Computer Design of Mechanisms.

• Relevant Coursework: Control Systems; Materials Engineering; Manufacturing Systems; Energy Conversion; Mechanical Systems Design.

• Advanced multidisciplinary training in aerial robotics, autonomous systems, remote sensing, artificial intelligence, and decision support technologies for wildfire prevention, monitoring, suppression, and post-fire management.
• Engaged in practical field demonstrations, sensor payload experiments, and lectures delivered by international leaders in wildfire robotics and fire science.

• Formulated and solved a coverage-constrained multi-vehicle routing problem (VRP) with service times, maximizing household population reach under strict battery limits.
• Coupled greedy maximum coverage reduction with energy-aware Clarke-Wright savings heuristics, dynamic programming benchmarks, and Gazebo SITL simulation.

• Engineered a physics-accurate multirotor simulation in NVIDIA Isaac Sim 6.0 with PX4 SITL, Pegasus MAVLink backend, and a 1 km² digital twin of Concow, CA with real-time ELMFIRE fire spread.
• Synchronized direct sensor view capturing radiometric thermal IR + RGB side-by-side with chase perspective of Alta X flying in the dynamic smoke plume.

• Autonomy Technical Lead in the $11M global XPRIZE Wildfire competition (Autonomous Wildfire Response track), featured in IEEE Spectrum and FOX 5 DC.
• Coordinated onboard companion compute, flight control, and dual-sensor (radiometric thermal + EO) fire detection pipelines for rapid automated wildfire localization and suppression handoff.

• Finalist winner ($5,000 USD Grant) at the 2026 WUI Fire Engineering Summit Student Pitch Competition (SFPE Foundation & United Engineering Foundation).
• Engineered an autonomous dual-drone cooperative framework: "Seeker" detects ignitions via YOLO and thermal vision, handing coordinates to "Firejumper" for precision suppression drops, validated via HITL simulation and field drops.